Two successful entrepreneurs talk about manufacturing, lean principles, and the freedom they are pursuing in life and business.
You're listening to the Lean Built podcast. I'm Jay.
Andrew:And I'm Andrew. In this podcast, we discuss our manufacturing companies,
Jay:lean principles, and the freedom that we're pursuing in life and business. You know what I need right now in life, Andrew, is an expert on holsters. Would that be you?
Andrew:I play one on TV. So what do got?
Jay:You you know a thing or two. So I I stopped by on Saturday and actually shot you a quick message. You're very kind to respond on a Saturday, which I love. I'm in the market to get a a compact pistol.
Andrew:Mhmm.
Jay:And so I was looking at just I went in looking at, like, okay. Maybe it's gonna be a a Glock because I'm not a Glock guy or anything like But let me let me let me look at the Glock, just 19. Let me just take a look at that. Let me take a peek. But then the guy's like, well, what do you have now?
Jay:And I have an S and P shield Yep. In which I is small, it's concealable, and it's really snappy. And I thought maybe I could should go a little bit bigger. And he's like, oh, do you know about the SIG p three sixty five? No.
Jay:He pulled it out. I fell in love with it. What I did not fall in love with is the nomenclature to try and understand where several days after my gun shop visit, and I still don't understand. Even after multiple YouTube videos that that are, you know, at some point, they're several years old. So am I getting old information?
Jay:Did they update it? The SIG site doesn't really capture it. Can you give me a rundown of this p three sixty five and what holsters a holster manufacturer might sell? What are the differences?
Andrew:Yeah. So let me back up for a second. Yes. The Glock nineteen is like the Toyota Corolla of handguns. It's a great midsize sedan.
Andrew:K. Super reliable. Been in production for a super long time. Basically, all the kinks are worked out.
Jay:Uh-huh.
Andrew:It's great. The only downside for the Glock nineteen is that even for people of average build, it is on the large size to be actually concealable without impacting your range of motion. And one of the things that we've seen a lot more of in the past five years in conceal carry is that there is less of an emphasis on what you can conceal while standing Mhmm. Versus what you can live with day to day without it impinging on your range of motion. K.
Andrew:Because, you know, if you had two shoes and one weighed 10 pounds and one weighed normal weight, eventually, it's going to affect your gait and your muscles and your skeletal balance. It's gonna have an impact on you. And so bigger guns are harder to carry and come with more of a comfort penalty. The p three six five is a great gun. What Sig did with the p three twenty and the p three six five was move away from having the lower receiver of the firearm be the serialized part to having there be a removable, what they call FCU, fire control unit.
Andrew:This is modularity in handguns. The downside of modularity in handguns is that the handguns are now modular. And what that means is the nomenclature is arbitrary. Okay. So when we talk about firearms for concealed carry, we normally consider a couple factors.
Andrew:The first one is caliber. The second one is overall size and thickness. And then when you talk about dimensions, the two specific dimensions we care about are the length of the slide, which is the distance from the backplate to the muzzle of the barrel K. And the length of the grip, which is typically from the top of the slide to the bottom of the magazine. Mhmm.
Andrew:What actually impacts concealment is the length of the grip because that's the part that's oriented perpendicular to your leg Mhmm. And will tend to project through your clothing and result in what we call printing. Right. The p three six five is a short slide, short grip firearm. Extremely concealable in a good caliber.
Andrew:You can get it in nine millimeter or three eighty, and the difference between nine and three eighty today is much less than it was twenty years ago because modern three eighty loads have really closed the performance gap and have come much closer to achieving the same performance as nine millimeter loads. Okay. So, ammo wise, you used to pay a big penalty in power and performance to get a small reduction in size of the gun by going down from nine millimeter to three eighty, and that's no longer the case. So the three six five is a great gun. It is a short slide, short grip.
Andrew:Then they have a p three six five XL, extra long. Well, are we talking about extra long in waist or extra long in inseam? And one of the ways to understand slide length versus grip length is just like waist and inseam in pants. K. Because when you holster the firearm, the slide is in line with your inseam measurement Mhmm.
Andrew:And the grip is in line with your waist measurement.
Jay:Oh, that's a neat way of looking at it. Yeah. Okay.
Andrew:And, generally, you can conceal a long firearm in the inseam Mhmm. As long as it has a relatively short grip in the waist. Okay. But even if you can conceal it standing up, the longer the gun is and the more it goes across the hinge point of your hip joint
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:The more it will have a a penalty for comfort and range of motion.
Jay:Okay. Your holsters really quick pause. Yeah. The holsters, you can adjust the what what do you call it? The ride height?
Andrew:Ride height is the where the neutral setting is
Jay:Uh-huh.
Andrew:Of where the grip of the gun sits in relation to your waistband.
Jay:Okay.
Andrew:So you can because the belt clips attach to your belt. You can change their mounting position on the outside of the holster and have the holster ride relatively slightly higher or slightly lower in relation to those clips. And because those clips are tied to your belt, you're effectively changing the height of the gun in relation to your belt line. Mhmm. The general calculus there is the lower you run the gun, the lower in relation to your belt line, the more concealable it will be, but the more penalty you pay in terms of actually getting a good grip on it and accessing it quickly.
Andrew:If you run it too low and you start to bury the grip in the belt line, it becomes very challenging Right. To quickly get a secure, what we would call a master grip or a full firing grip.
Jay:Okay.
Andrew:Because the same way in lean, say touch things once. Mhmm. Pick up the tool in the orientation in which you'll use it, which is why we have tons of magnetic mounts for scissors and pliers and all kinds of things so you can grab them by the handle Mhmm. In the orientation in which we'll use them and not pick them up upside down or hanging off a hook or backwards out of a drawer and then have to reorient them by shuffling them in your hands. Mhmm.
Andrew:It is super important for any defensive firearm that the holster accomplish three basic goals. It has to fully cover and securely protect the trigger. Mhmm. Because you should carry the gun fully loaded. Mhmm.
Andrew:And that trigger must not be accessible. The second is it has to retain that firearm on your person. So it has to be securely attached to you in such a way that it can't shift around or become free or become loose or come off. Mhmm. And then the third, it has to maintain that firearm in a position where you can reliably and repeatably achieve a full firing grip when you go to draw it.
Andrew:Because if you have a gun wrapped in a sock, stuffed down your pants
Jay:Mhmm. It can
Andrew:be concealable, and it can be super comfortable. But if you actually need the firearm
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:At that moment, it is a Russian babushka doll, and you're never gonna get it out in time.
Jay:Right. You know what I'm picturing? A a Venn diagram. Yeah. These three things.
Jay:And some holsters are two out of three. Some
Andrew:are two of
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:And the center of that Venn diagram legitimately shifts. So if you go back to the nineteen sixties, '19 seventies, like big city narcs, cops who were doing a lot of plainclothes drug work, it was a common thing to have guys deep concealing small compact guns like a a Smith and Wesson j frame revolvers, like five shot snubbies. Mhmm. And a five shot snubby is an incredibly effective gun at, like, two to five feet. Mhmm.
Andrew:It is not a great gun for 25 yards. Mhmm. You have to have an exceptionally skillful shooter to manage the difficult trigger and the minimal sights on a J frame at any significant distance. But if your goal is conceal it under almost all circumstances, pat downs Mhmm. Then a J frame is like state of the art and has been for sixty years.
Andrew:And so there were a lot of times when people would understand that their particular calculus based on their situation meant if they got made and the gun got discovered, they were going to get killed immediately. Then in those situations, concealment is of supreme value. Comfort and access to a full firing grip are dramatically less important.
Jay:Wow. I love this. This is like the science behind this.
Andrew:There is really we call it concealment mechanics. There is the concealment mechanics, which is simply the physics. It's like feeds and speeds in SFM. Mhmm. The same way we say, you know, generally, on this size cutter, in this taper machine, in this material, you should be feeding about Mhmm.
Andrew:This SFM, this chip per tooth. We also can talk about the science of context and understanding what you actually need. And that's exactly like, hey. Is this a prototype where I need a super bombproof container based method cam template where I can drag my vice and my workpiece and everything in, and I can generate my roughing op, which will run for the next two and a half hours Mhmm. And send it on my five axis immediately?
Andrew:Or is this a situation where I need to spend the next three days shaving seven seconds out of this cycle because we're gonna run it a hundred thousand times in the next six months?
Jay:Right.
Andrew:That that balance, that Venn diagram of what do I really need in this circumstance? Is highly variable. And a lot in machining and in concealed carry, a lot of the arguments and disagreements and just drama online is about people speaking to somebody else's unrelated context without understanding it.
Jay:Wow. Okay. I'm thinking in my industry in workholding, which I've I've in in a video, I referred to it as production theory, but, because generally people can connect with that, but I call it workholding theory. If a guy says, hey. I'm starting to shop.
Jay:I'm a twenty five year seasoned machinist. I'm going independent. I have a handful of customers that they only want me to do short run prototype stuff.
Andrew:Mhmm.
Jay:I wanna buy two pallet systems. I go, woah. Hold on a second, buddy. You know, I think you could just do a Curt six inch in your mini mill and just be fine. But if a guy's like, hey, I got a v f six.
Jay:I'm thinking of, you know, buying a double station vice. I would probably say I really do think that you should get a RotoVise with a fourth axis because if you're doing, you know, three inch cube work,
Andrew:you
Jay:need that. And then just like, to bring lean into it, like a one piece flow. If you've got two machines, they should be doing if you want, like, great walk away time. You can do op one, op two in, in this on the same table or two machines. Because at the end of the day, it's just still one spindle.
Jay:And, and you just have you're really increasing your walk away time. But, yeah, there's some parallels there. I love that. So There's a lot
Andrew:of connections. So I'll give you the now the sixty second rundown on the p three six five nomenclature from start to finish because SIG has done two bad things. K. They have named the products in a way that is not logical linear, where there's no connection between the attributes of the gun and the name of the firearm.
Jay:Mhmm. Okay.
Andrew:And second, they have on the physical parts marked them and engraved them in the most ambiguous way possible. So here we go. Deep breath. P three six five, short slide, short grip. P three six five XL, short grip, long slide.
Andrew:P three six five x, short slide, long grip. P three six five x macro, long slide, long grip, totally different rail, not compatible with the same lights or lasers. P three six five fuse is a extra long slide macro, but they don't call it a macro. Long grip, the p three six five x macro TAC OPS and the p three six five x macro comp are both variations of the p three six five macro that have the same slide length and the same grip length, but have differences in the slide and the difference differences in the height and shape of the control levers, which can impact holster fit. Add on to that, dozens of companies make aftermarket slides and aftermarket grip modules because the only thing you have to have from SIG is the internal modular fire control unit Mhmm.
Andrew:Which means you can have a guy email me, like many guys have emailed me, saying, I have a p three six five, and and they wanna know what holster to make it fit. And I asked them for a photo of their build, and what they have is an aftermarket slide with an aftermarket trigger group in an aftermarket grip module. And the only thing in there with an aftermarket barrel and a comp and an optic. And the only thing in the entire build that is actually factory sig is the internal fire control unit that touches the holster absolutely nowhere.
Jay:Oh, that is so wild. I've stepped into the pain of your world. Okay.
Andrew:And I look I look at that and go, my dude, the only part of your Honda Civic that's factory is the muffler.
Jay:Right. Right.
Andrew:Everything else is aftermarket. Why would you expect that this should just play nice?
Jay:Okay. Alright. So how do you deal with this? Because this I mean, we don't have this issue. Like, we say, hey.
Jay:Can your PPS go on my my Doosan or my Haas or, you know, whatever.
Andrew:It's mad it's maddening, and almost all the gun companies are bad at it. So back in the day, Smith and Wesson used to have four digit model numbers. I have a three eight nine six. I have a four zero five two. And those numbers were discrete and clear and unambiguous.
Andrew:And because the gun platforms weren't modular, you couldn't mix and match Yeah. And swift swap and do all the craziness. But the obsession with modularity, which is not itself a bad focus, what it leads to is a nearly infinite number of possible permutations, many of which are mutually incompatible with standard holster fits. Mhmm. And lead to every single case being basically a snowflake.
Jay:Mhmm. Wow. Okay.
Andrew:Now we can try to design around it because we can take CAD or laser reverse scans of multiple models and try to what we call harmonize them. Try to say, let's find and we really we do this very intentionally. We try to find what are the outer bounding dimensions in different key places across multiple models. Mhmm. Because anytime we can make a holster that equally well fits three or four or five models, that's a win.
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:That just allows us to collapse a number of potential SKUs into a single thing. And it also drastically reduces the customer service burden of needing to find out to the nth degree exactly which flavor the customer has. We can just say, hey. If you're between points a and c, this b holster will fit. Mhmm.
Andrew:Great. But a lot of gun companies are horrible. We have a whole T shirt about it.
Jay:Really? Okay.
Andrew:Yeah. It says, like, XL macro plus two point o. So it has all the nomenclature from all the guns. Great.
Jay:Okay.
Andrew:And the bottom, it just says, you know, l o l kill me. Like, just.
Jay:That's so good.
Andrew:And anybody outside the holster space sees that T shirt and doesn't get it at all.
Jay:Got it. Got it.
Andrew:But Smith and Wesson has done this. Sig has done this. The classic exam the the the classic Glock Glock follies is that they used a two digit nomenclature numbering system for all their guns, and that two digit numbering system overlaps with almost all the common calibers, and yet those model numbers are basically completely non overlapping with the actual calibers.
Jay:Right.
Andrew:So, like, the Glock rundown is the Glock seventeen is a nine millimeter. Glock 18 is a fully automatic, highly restricted nine millimeter. The Glock 19 is a mid sized nine millimeter. The Glock 20 is a full size 45. The no.
Andrew:Sorry. Full size 10 millimeter. The Glock 21 is a full size forty five. The Glock 22 is a full size forty Smith and Wesson. The Glock 23 is a midsized 40 Smith and Wesson.
Andrew:The Glock 24 and the Glock 25 are ultra long competition length, nine millimeter and 40 caliber. The Glock 26 is an ultra short nine millimeter. The Glock 27 is an equally ultra short but weirdly fatter 40 Smith and Wesson. The Glock 28 is a weird caliber that's only sold in South America. The Glock 29 is a compact 10 millimeter.
Andrew:The Glock 30 is a compact 45. The Glock 31 is a proprietary three fifty seven SIG caliber that's basically defunct. The Glock 32, I don't even remember. The Glock 33, I don't remember. I think there's another three fifty seven SIG.
Andrew:The Glock 34 is an ultra long slide competition length nine millimeter. The Glock 35 is an ultra long competition length 40 Smith and Wesson. The Glock 36 is a single stack 45. The Glock 37, 30 eight, and 39 basically don't exist in The US market. The Glock 40 is not a 40 caliber.
Andrew:The Glock 40 like, it's going on and on. These numbers go on and on. The Glock 45 is a nine millimeter. The Glock 47 is a nine millimeter. The Glock 43 and the Glock 48 are both single stack nine millimeters, but that wasn't enough.
Andrew:They decided to make a Glock 43, a Glock 43 x Yeah. And a Glock 43 x MOS. And then they rolled out a Glock 34 MOS, a Glock 17 MOS, a Glock 19 MOS. Wow. And then in the fifth generation of Glock, they took the 22 and the 23, which are were historically the same size as the nine millimeter siblings, and they changed them so they're slightly fatter.
Andrew:And for generations three and four, nine and 40 are interchangeable in holster fit. And for gen five, they no longer are.
Jay:Wow. I don't normally listen to our podcast, but this is one that I'm gonna read listen to.
Andrew:Like, this this is the kind of manic thing where by getting into this industry fifteen years ago
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:Sixteen years ago, I bought the ticket and I'm riding the ride.
Jay:Yeah. And the
Andrew:road is crazy. Would be like if every every different tool holder company standard for what was an ER 16 was different. Man. And it just gets crazy. Like, if you had modular tool holders where you could slap a BT 30 taper on an ER 16 shank and change the length and then put a different collet nut on it.
Andrew:When you're on with bearings, one like, it gets
Jay:it a number.
Andrew:And it gets yeah. But but a number that didn't actually designate it.
Jay:Didn't communicate it.
Andrew:An arbitrary descriptive term that you had to brute force memorize,
Jay:it is insanity. So I got lucky by by assuming a Glock nineteen because it has a nine in it. It's a nine millimeter. It's nine by Yeah. That was that was
Andrew:a broken clock being right once a day.
Jay:Man, that's so wild. Okay. And you know what's crazy for those that are listening while everyone listening is you're not re we didn't talk about this. You didn't prepare. You're not looking at a cheat sheet.
Jay:Your eyes on camera talking to me. This is all in your head.
Andrew:This is This is all in my head. And we've worked to drill into my skull and take all this information out and teach it to our website based AI.
Jay:Okay. Alright.
Andrew:Because we get so many questions about these kinds of things. And you have the exact same thing once you get into accessories like weapon lights.
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:So, you know, the big three are Streamlight, Surefire, and Olight, and they make a wide variety of weapon lights for a wide variety of guns. They hired the guy that Smith and Wesson and Sig and Glock had fired. Uh-huh. I mean, I'm this is facetious. But they hired the guy who was the namer at those companies who just screwed it up.
Jay:Uh-huh.
Andrew:When he finally got fired from there, the weapon like companies hired him. And so you have TLR seven, TLR seven a, TLR seven x, TLR seven HLX, TLR seven sub, TLR seven sub x, sub HLX. And and all these things. We have more customer service tickets Uh-huh. Over misunderstanding and mispurchase Uh-huh.
Andrew:Of these individual compact weapon lights than anything else that produces recurring tickets. Because the nomenclature and the explanations from the companies are so poor Mhmm. That people buy the they they buy a gun and they buy the wrong light.
Jay:Mhmm. Okay.
Andrew:And we have spent like, I've shot YouTube video after YouTube video. We've written FAQs. We've trained our AI. And finally, we just said forget it. Mhmm.
Andrew:We'll just become a dealer.
Jay:Okay. Let me throw some things at you. First of all, your website is beautiful. Let me ask you, like, what platform are you on?
Andrew:We actually recently migrated our website. We are running WooCommerce. It is a WordPress site.
Jay:Yeah. So this is fairly new because it it's very different than the site I visited a year ago, two years ago. Was it right? Yes.
Andrew:Okay. Yes. It has changed a lot, and that is completely due to my COO, Ben Crum, who does a phenomenal job maintaining and updating our website.
Jay:Great. Looks amazing. Second, if I click this little icon, this chat icon, if I start to enter my name and email my question
Andrew:You'll be talking to our AI.
Jay:Okay. Alright. And then do you review those? What does that look like?
Andrew:We review a % of those tickets. Okay. Alright. So every day Uh-huh. Myself or our customer service lead Justin, either so there's basically two paths.
Andrew:Every single customer service well, every single AI chat produces a customer service ticket. We always route it into a customer service ticket, and then we review it. And we try to review those as close to real time as possible. Oftentimes, during business hours, you'll get a review of your ticket within sixty to ninety minutes of you having the chat session.
Jay:Okay.
Andrew:And if everything the AI told you is complete and correct, we just tag it out and close it. If anything was left out, if the AI answer was incomplete Mhmm. Or was ambiguous, not as helpful as it could have been, then we follow-up with a real person email saying, hey, Jeff, thanks for getting in touch. We review all our AI tickets, and the answer you got was not complete. This is the piece of information that was missing.
Andrew:Or the answer you got was not accurate. Mhmm. Because despite our best efforts, because there is no standardized nomenclature, and people often leave things out or change the syntax of how they describe something Okay. Trying to imagine every possible way that a person could type out
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:A designation for a gun model or a light model is itself an extremely challenging funnel. Like, we're trying to catch every permutation.
Jay:Oh, sure.
Andrew:The problem is a lot of those permutations, if you permutate them enough, they actually mean a different product. And so
Jay:And so this is a plug in. Right? Like an AI plug in for WooCommerce's platform?
Andrew:No. This is a completely homegrown sandboxed trained by our staff over the past year. We built our own AI using
Jay:What I'm what I'm looking at is, like, it's like some it's a WooCommerce is on the WordPress platform. What is it called? Like
Andrew:Yes. So the actual chat interface Yeah. The interface is a plug in.
Jay:Got it.
Andrew:The actual AI on the back end is not just us saying, oh, WordPress has an AI. Let's just let that AI talk to our customers.
Jay:You're you're training this AI.
Andrew:And this AI is sandboxed. This is not a generally accessible to the web search anywhere. We have a mass of documents Mhmm. That contain all the technical information about our products, and the AI is deriving its answers from within that limited library. So we describe the AI as more like a curated librarian Mhmm.
Andrew:Than like a large language model Mhmm. That goes out and crawls the web and finds an answer to your question.
Jay:Right. Okay. Yeah.
Andrew:And so anytime we get a ticket where the AI misses, either it's incomplete or it's incorrect, we have an internal AI team, and we we tag all of those. And then we update our documentation and then run test tickets to make sure that the newly returned answer is corrected.
Jay:Mhmm. Yeah. We went down this path, and we could not get the AI engine to to just give correct information. Like, we would have like, you can do your initial document upload, which was
Andrew:Mhmm.
Jay:We took every video I've ever done and did just and put in the transcripts from it. We took
Andrew:our
Jay:website as a point of reference. We took our FAQs. We've got the spreadsheet with, you know, the common FAQs. Yeah. And then, you know, one of the common questions is what are feeds and speeds for the our eighth inch gasket slotting end mill?
Jay:Mhmm. And over time, we do it 10 times and it would answer wrong two or three times. And twenty to thirty percent failure rate on something that is well documented in Yeah.
Andrew:Not acceptable.
Jay:Totally unacceptable. Yeah. So I just said, no. We're gonna need to pause. We're early adopters.
Jay:This this goes back to a year and a half ago Yep. Where AI is so fast developing that I think I really need to circle back and and take a second look at it.
Andrew:So So the reason the reason that we pursued AI, my good friend Jon Hauptman at Philster Right. Was I'm kinda surfing off his wake
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:In this because he spent a lot of time and a bunch of money with his staff training their AI that they call Phil. Uh-huh. Yeah. And they have they had a much more ambitious project, which was to take all of their company's educational resources, which is at this point, hundreds of hours of video and blog posts and all kinds of things about concealment mechanics.
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:And systematize it, organize it, improve the vocabulary, standardize it, and make it into a searchable library that Phil could crawl through and give accurate answers to customers. Mhmm. That was a long and complicated project. Once they had kind of cracked the code on how they were doing that, we took a lot of what they we had learned because we were working with them on that project, and then built our own kind of mini AI alongside. It had a much more limited scope because we're not trying to describe everything about concealed carry.
Andrew:We're trying to specifically answer tactical questions about our product families. Mhmm. And the this is one of the big, I think, misconceptions about AI is that AI will just understand it all, and people will be irrelevant.
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:And the skill of organizing, prompting, and restraining an AI to only crawl the information that you want to refer to your chosen resources in a consistent and repeatable way is an art.
Jay:Yo. Absolutely. It's a it's a skill and art.
Andrew:Yeah. I've heard people like, oh, yeah. I used this AI to train that AI, and then I used that second AI to train this third AI. And at the end we have like AI cube, and you're like, yeah, but it's wrong. Yeah.
Andrew:A lot of the time. Yeah. Right. Because the goal, our goal for AI is not to replace human experts. Mhmm.
Andrew:But to take the 70 or 80% of questions that don't actually require an expert to answer them and answer them with an AI.
Jay:Yeah. That's right.
Andrew:Because, like, if I had a basic math question, asking a, you know, an internationally recognized award winning mathematician to help me multiply a binomial by a trinomial Mhmm. He'll get it right. She'll get it right. Total waste of their time. Mhmm.
Andrew:Yeah. Any middle school math teacher should be able to help me do that. Mhmm. No. And an AI should be able to help me do that.
Jay:Yeah. No. I I just think AI is, you know, about two years ago, we had a discussion when AI what ChatGPT had kinda debuted, and they said, man, look at this demo. It wrote this whole script, with this character by this writer in this setting, and and it was complete, it did it in thirty seconds. And it was like, wow.
Jay:We need to watch this. There's there's a lot of fear. This was in our convene group, and I said, look. Everyone was had their concerns, and I said, look. This is such a powerful technology.
Jay:I'm not going to push back against this. I'm going to jump in. It would be a Luddite the Luddite that was arguing against motor powered carriages at the turn of the century
Andrew:Mhmm.
Jay:And going, we gotta save these horses. No. No. No. Horses need to need to be for, you know, recreation or, you know, specific tasks.
Jay:This is better. I think that AI, it's we're at the point where in in manufacturing where it's taken men off of manual machines, and it's actually put servos or a DRO on it, or what CAM did for creating g code.
Andrew:It's Mhmm.
Jay:It's just so much better and we need to embrace it. Well well, like companies like Toolpath or there's another one I keep getting ads for CAM something NC Cloud? What is it? NC Cloud. Thank you.
Jay:Yeah. Thank you. It's just you need to embrace it, but it's such a fast adoption rate that one year of watching AI develop feels like five to six years. It's gotten that much better.
Andrew:Yeah. And it's just it's very much in some ways, it's like the well, what will happen to all the elevator operators if you change to put push push buttons? And it's like, well, hopefully, they'll find something else more productive and more fulfilling to do. Yeah. Some of them won't.
Andrew:Mhmm. But most of them can.
Jay:Right.
Andrew:Mhmm. And this morning, I spent my entire morning at a career fair, career day at a local high school. And this was the first time I've gone to a career day, and two things stood out to me. First was I really should have taken our spinning wheel to give away prizes.
Jay:Oh, man. Put it
Andrew:I should have relabeled the podcast spinning wheel and taken it to this because there was one other table in this whole gymnasium full of four by eight foot tables. Uh-huh. One other table showed up with a spinning wheel, and it was Domino's, and they were giving away slices of pizza. Like, would spin for, like, nothing or a slice of pizza. Okay.
Andrew:And I'm like, okay. I could have had a cool spinning wheel and given away some more interesting stuff.
Jay:Sure.
Andrew:But there was still an enormous amount of interest. I was one of the few tables that had a lot of things to handle. Mhmm. We had machined brass and aluminum and steel parts. We had three d prints out of TPU and PLA and carbon fiber PLA.
Andrew:We had a bunch of laser cut metal parts. We had laser cut plastic parts. We had thermoform plastic parts. We had a whole bunch of different things that you could just pick up and handle. Mhmm.
Andrew:And I brought as many bright colored things as I could. Cool. And and students would walk by it, and the majority of students walked by almost every table in the gym without really paying attention to anything because they were just not interested.
Jay:Uh-huh. Yeah.
Andrew:But of the students who were actually scanning tables and looking and seeing what was up, we got a lot of attention. That's great. You know, a lot of students stopped and were like, what is this? And the mix of what was on our table was eclectic enough Mhmm. That it wasn't easy to do, like, oh, well, that's a so and so company or that's a so and so company.
Andrew:They'd be like, what is all this stuff? And it was really fun. And figuring out how to open up those conversations, because I'm not scared of talking to high schoolers. I used to be a high school teacher. There's a way of bantering with high school students.
Andrew:But figuring out how to ask them questions that would help them engage in, what do we have here? Mhmm. And what are you actually looking at? And if you were gonna consider a career in whatever field this table is about, what does that mean, and what do you need to have to go after that?
Jay:What was your goal in this? Are you looking for potential hires?
Andrew:Looking for two things. Looking to just hone our company's ability to message to young people Mhmm. And also potentially because a lot of high schools around here will have either apprenticeship or internship programs. We have the option when we signed up for this particular career date to either mark our sign for our table as is currently hiring or is not currently hiring. I see.
Andrew:And we are currently hiring in the sense that we would be happy to have a student in for a summer internship or if you're graduating. So our cutoff was if you're looking for a full time production position, you need to be 18. Mhmm. Just because I don't wanna deal with the complications of having under 18 full time. There's other complications there.
Jay:And and working in manufacturing is actually pretty restricted, at least here in California, of course. But yeah.
Andrew:Everything's restricted in California except for I don't know. Except for weed. But for a summer internship
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:Anybody 16 or over, great. Happy to consider them. And we did do some giveaways, and the giveaway was really simple. I took a bunch of our OCD Purell carrier holsters with a neck lanyard, just a paracord. Did them all up in neon colors, took those there, and I had a bunch of machine parts or partially machine parts on the table.
Andrew:And if you wanted to try to win a Purell Carrier, I would pick a metal part at random off the table, and I would grab a set of calipers and measure a critical dimension. Mhmm. And you had to guess it and hit it plus or minus point one.
Jay:Oh, nice. Okay.
Andrew:And so I was like, okay. How big around is this piece of bar stock, or how long is that machined part? Uh-huh. And over the course of three hours, I basically gave away all my Purell cares. I only had 10 of them.
Andrew:Yeah. But it was really fun and challenging, and it was interesting to see students pick up parts and go, okay. Well, I know that, like, six inches is about this big and that's smaller than that, but, like, an inch is like and they were clearly sort of reasoning it through, but people's relative sense of dimensions and scale were often wildly off. Mhmm.
Jay:Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew:But it was it was really fun. I enjoyed talking to them all. We got a bunch of names of kids who are interested in finding out more about internships. We gave away a ton of stickers. Yeah.
Andrew:I didn't think to bring candy. So the two things I would bring next time would be the spinning wheel
Jay:K.
Andrew:And candy.
Jay:And candy.
Andrew:And then the question is, how accurately can you scope your candy selection
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:To choose for the personality and work style traits of the person you wanna hire?
Jay:Interesting. Wow. That's some deep science right there.
Andrew:I mean, no. It's it's it's completely cookie. Like, my idea was we're typically looking to hire unusual people. So let's put out a bowl of black licorice and a bowl of mega warheads. Right.
Andrew:And if anybody comes up to our table and is like, oh, man. Black licorice and warheads, these are my favorite. We just say, here's your job application.
Jay:What's that story? Reminds me of that story in the old testament where they go down to the river to drink and and if someone
Andrew:Yeah. It's Gideon.
Jay:It's Gideon. Yeah. That's what
Andrew:I the men some of the men bend down and drink just from the creek and some bend like a dog, and some scoop the water up with their hands.
Jay:Right. Yeah.
Andrew:And based on who does what, the Lord tells Gideon to divide the army and send most of the men home.
Jay:Yeah. It's so good. We kinda do the same thing we do with, you know, with our Lego
Andrew:test Lego test. Applicants. Yeah.
Jay:It's the same thing. And we watch them. It's not just about time. It it's also about quality, but it's also about process. You know, if a guy starts off by separating the LEGOs into different colored piles or size, oh my gosh.
Andrew:Ding. Ding.
Jay:He's you know, this guy's a fit. And then if they go longer on the time, yeah, but they spend a little time, like, getting it right, and they nailed the build. So no. It's good. I think it's also cool that you in at one okay.
Jay:So so a a school, job fair, maybe it's once, twice a year. It's so cool that these students might be exposed to a conversation or, like, a caliber test where they they're gonna remember that. You know? Like, one of the games I play with my boys is we take a stopwatch when we're really bored, and we press start and we press stop, and then we just keep ourselves entertained to see how close we can get to ten seconds.
Andrew:And Mhmm.
Jay:As an only child, these are the types of games that I thrived on as a kid with no playmates in a in a neighborhood with no kids.
Andrew:Click click click click.
Jay:Yeah. And I
Andrew:would Stop.
Jay:I would play against the clock and against myself, and and it was it was fun. But it gave me such an accurate sense of time where I could pretty much go out to, you know, thirty seconds, forty seconds, and be within a half second accuracy to this day just because I had done that. And I'm gonna start this thing called the caliper challenge, and we're gonna film it. We're go gonna go around the the shop and tell people, you know, looking at the backside of the caliper, stop it at one inch. Stop it at, like, two and a quarter inches, you know, and then we'll post that.
Jay:And that that's gonna be fun because it gives people a a a baseline for the size of things, size, time, all these neat things. So
Andrew:We call that having a calibrated eye. When I was in the violin making program, we were jokingly say, so and so is a super square. And what a super square meant was, like, you could look at angles because we we did a lot of hand carving of wood. Like, you could look at an angle and tell when it was 90. Wow.
Andrew:Or you could look at a thing and estimate like, okay. That's about 6.5 millimeters. Uh-huh. And certainly, it is honed by practice. Like, you look at a piece of bar stock go, oh, yeah.
Andrew:That that's about 1.375. Uh-huh. Yeah. You know? Well, that's about two inches.
Andrew:Yeah. And for most of the time that we do the estimating, we're not then programming something and sending a program based on our estimation of the size of the bar stock. It's just like, oh, I'm going over to the rack. I need a piece that's about this size. And my eye can immediately go that not that.
Andrew:Not that. Not that. Okay. That one probably is there a one closer? Yeah.
Andrew:That one. That's the one I want.
Jay:Yeah. That's cool. I love it.
Andrew:But there's a great video. If you like I like a lot of instrumental funk music like the, the fearless flyers and Wolfpack, and there's a great video of the drummer.
Jay:What about animals as leaders?
Andrew:Animals as leaders, not real familiar.
Jay:Not not funky enough? Give it a listen.
Andrew:There's a great video of Nate Smith, who's the drummer for Vulfpeck and he's a great funk drummer.
Jay:Yeah.
Andrew:But he's playing a gig, and he has the audience do a recurring a silent count to seven. Like, counting in 74 is hard. Yeah. +1 234. 1 2 3.
Andrew:1 2 3 4. 1 2 3. 1 2 And he has the entire crowd in this club, and no one's counting out loud and no one's subclamping. Uh-huh. But he is on the drum kit, and he's giving a downbeat on one.
Andrew:And everyone in this space is counting to seven on their own and then clapping.
Jay:Okay.
Andrew:And over time, it just it spreads wider and wider and wider and wider. And it's so funny. Like, you know, the the kinds of musical tricks you learn for counting in odd meters. Did you ever learn any weird tricks for counting in, like, five four time or seven four time?
Jay:No. We're just picturing other songs that are familiar to five four.
Andrew:Like, one of the tricks I learned when I took jazz improv was like, hey, if you're playing in five four, you can always cycle with you can mentally count rather than going one, two, three, four, five. Mhmm. You can think about words like university, university, university. Like, you can actually use words that have the syllabic count that you're going for. K.
Andrew:And it's easier to not lose your place when you loop a word.
Jay:Mhmm. Okay.
Andrew:Because you're not linearly counting five steps or seven steps or nine steps. Yeah. You've got a big you know, it's a 14 bar.
Jay:Uh-huh. Right.
Andrew:It's a 14 bar which university university, but it's actually +1 2345. 1 2 3 4 5. One two 45. 1 2. Mhmm.
Andrew:And those kind of tricks are really fun, but at the same time, I don't understand bands that really play in complicated math rock. Like, jazz where everything is in a mixed meter and there's multiple mixed meters per song. Mhmm. And then they intermix meters in the single chorus, and, like, you get to the head of the song and, like, it's got four different time signatures before you get back to the next verse or the next person takes their solo. And I go, do you guys all perform in sandals?
Andrew:Are you counting on your toes?
Jay:Right.
Andrew:How are you doing this?
Jay:Yeah. It's pretty impressive. But at the end of the day, does it sound better?
Andrew:Well, it's it's it's impressive
Jay:it's impressive to musicians, other musicians. Right? Like, that impressed me, but my wife would be like, I don't know. It's a cool song.
Andrew:Yeah. It's it's impressive. I think it impresses people who can't quite do it, and it's lame to people who can. It's like, okay. Okay.
Andrew:You're in seven four. Now you're in eleven eight. Okay. Cool.
Jay:We're going to do an episode on the dark side of lean, and I'd like to draw a parallel here if there's a lean that's in an odd time signature.
Andrew:So the parallel there is very, very simple. Mixed meters are often performative, not functional. And the dark side of lean is often performative
Jay:Mhmm.
Andrew:And not functional. Yep. It makes a big deal about principles, and it will take certain ideas and concepts and run them to 11 at the expense of actual practical applications.
Jay:Mhmm. Yeah. One thing I appreciate about FastCap is all their fixtures, all their little improvements, they're made out of wooden cardboard and tape and glue. And that was just something that I'm not okay with that. A, I hate working with wood, ironically, have a tiny home company, but it's it's one of those things.
Jay:It's like because it it's so inaccurate to sell.
Andrew:Such an inferior material.
Jay:Very much so, you know. So we'll do plastic or our, you know boy, we're loving three d printing because it is accurate, it's quick, it's not dirty, it's quick and just good enough, you know, and and we can standardize it. So but we're limited on size.
Andrew:So when we come back to the dark side of lean Mhmm. We will have to have Nathan edit in some weird, like, math rock jazz. And and forego our normal intro bumper music and have, like, dark side of lean theme song music.
Jay:Okay. To make the episode stand out. Great.
Andrew:To make it stand out. It'll stand out. Alright.
Jay:Well, let's publish this one because I can't wait to listen back to it.
Andrew:Alright. Thanks, Jay. See you. Good night. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lean Built podcast.
Andrew:Jay and I are very grateful for you taking the time to listen in, and we hope that it was helpful to you. Please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice, Don't forget to subscribe and share the episode with somebody you know who would enjoy it. Thanks.